Research on Respiratory Microbiome

Most of the causative agents for diseases enter to human body through respiratory tract. Thus, microbes inside human lung are an interesting topic. These respiratory microbiota could be beneficial, as well as harmful for personal health. Furthermore, microbes may control the severity of a disease condition and different hosts may have different outcome in the same disease depending on their lung microbiota.

This research focuses on lung microbiome of lung cancer and bronchiectasis patients’. It is aimed to study which type of microbiota inhabit lungs of the respective patients and what quantities are there and as to whether there is a connection and an effect of the microbiota towards the patients’ condition. Sampling is done to study upper and lower respiratory tract microbiota of the patients. Conventional culturing methods, as well as advanced molecular methods like next-generation sequencing techniques are used to achieve the specific objectives in this project.